Playlist

Live

June 24, 2016

Whiting Tennis
The Tom Price Desert Classic
The Shanty Tavern, Seattle

Firmly planted roots rock, no nonsense. The Shanty Tavern is about the size of a large elementary school classroom, low ceiling, wooden floor and wooden walls, a magnificent chamber for sound. Bang on.

Recorded

June 21, 2016
Symphony in B-flat Major Op. 60 (#4) - Beethoven - Academy of Ancient Music, Christopher Hogwood

How: one sonority is occupied by another.
How: the tone colors are pressed into other tone colors.

Performance Proposition: If a tiny fiddly bit was worth writing out it is worth making clearly audible.

Tarantelle in A-flat Major Op. 43 - Chopin - Alfred Cortot [5.VII.1933]

"Knock knock."
"Who's th . . ."
"Impatient New Phrase."

Klaviertrio in G minor Op. 110 - Schumann - Quatuor Via Nova, Jean Hubeau

Each thing that is a thing here is a densely packed mass, under high pressure, beneath layers of earth. To pry any thing that is a thing here apart requires immense effort. Or to simply let go.

Maureen Forrester

June 23, 2016
4 Ernste Gesänge Op. 121 - Brahms - Maureen Forrester, John Newmark

A narrowest passage, a tiniest fissure. How we twist to pass through.

Le Martyre de Saint-Sebestien - Debussy - Rotterdams Philharmonisch Orkest, James Conlon

It emanates, rises into being, a portent that pulls us further in. The earth engulfs us to beyond the conception of surface. At the end, unimagined, a sublime day.

In Session at the Tintinabulary
June 20, 2016
Gradus 292 160620 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

In which the second G-natural down from the top, performed pianissimo, sets off a car alarm in the distance.

June 22, 2016
4 St. Rage Songs, bass and 12-string tracks. - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Playlist

Live

January 17, 2015
Tosca - Puccini - Seattle Opera
McCaw Hall, Seattle

My new working theory of listening to Puccini: everything you hear is a cinematic close-up, hence the hothouse claustrophilia.

January 23, 2015

Karen in rock'n style

Dead Bars
Your Mother Should Know
Can You Imagine
Tom Price Desert Classic
Highline, Seattle

We'll start with the self descriptions:
Dead Bars: "distortion, melody, and playing fast"
Your Mother Should Know: "rock & roll dreamtime"
Can You Imagine: "anachronistic  new wave, girl-group pop and punk"
Tom Price Desert Classic: "pretty loud, w/yelling"

Aside from being a great line-up, this was the album release party for Your Mother Should Know's debut album Rocks and Glass ($7 to download at Bandcamp), and so a bit of history is in order. YMSK consists of my long-time collaborator and brother-in-law Neal Kosály-Meyer and his sister (and my spouse) Karen Eisenbrey. Neal met Steve Fisk (now the keyboard player of Can You Imagine, and well known in the music business as a producer) during his stint at Central many decades ago, at some point even convincing his other sister, Yvonne, to hire Steve's band to play the Bickleton HS prom. In the early '80s, at about the time I met Neal, he had joined forces with Karen and Yvonne to form a band, The PK's, that was all the rage of their living room (famous for sofas around!). Yes Neal, I have the recordings.

This is the second time that YMSK has followed Dead Bars on a bill. The first time being DB's first show at the Comet in March of 2013. This is also the second time they have been on a bill with Tom Price Desert Classic, having previously joined them at the High Dive last April.

Recorded

January 17, 2015
Night Music - Stan Brakhage

Each go-round, and it does go round, this 35 second film is a bit longer, a bit deeper, a bit more lovely. I watched it about six times.

Study 50 - Conlon Nancarrow [from Lost Works Last Works]

More and more I find that Nancarrow is less and less about sheer play-ability than about precision - about the exact color of when.

The juxtaposition of Brakhage and Nancarrow highlights a common element of their work. Each of them has endeavored to scrape the barnacles of collaboration from their respective medium, accepting a tedious work process as the price of liberation from compromise.

January 22, 2015
Wabi - Robert Morris - Margaret Kampmeier [from Open Space 14]

Waves of shifting and out-of-phase senses of momentum create interference patterns in a realm of perception otherwise unimagined. It is as though we are discovering a form of cognitive sub-harmonics. Any moment is believable as start, or midst, or end.

I had listened to this piece back in 2002, at which time I wrote in my journal: "texture is complex - as to rhythm and accent dynamic - but fairly uniform as to depth - i.e. - 1 to 4 or so notes at once - as simultaneity - or 0 to 4 - very clear pedalling - attack characteristics are echt Stravinskian - percussive, very clear as to - what? fingery rather than fisty. Treating piano as a tone(note?) producing body, rather than as a soundboard. articulate clarity."

Banned Rehearsal 596 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Isabel K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer - January 2001

In the film Little Big Man, Old Lodge Skins, upon finding himself still in this world, groans "Well, sometimes the magic works. Sometimes it doesn't." For my money, the magic was working the night we made this tape. Sax, cornet, and piano, neither quite duking it out. Percussion is the forest in which piano is the damp. Slipping easily from transparent sound to transparent sound, exploring the public of itself, dis-staged. Contiguities linger, but don't overstay. We enter of thickety meadow of ukuleles and zither.

Second Time Around - The Mexican Blackbirds [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

Song form subtly inflecting a noise thing.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 19, 2015
Deagan 150119
Deagan 150119 folded
Deagan 150119 folded rubbed - Keith Eisenbrey

This week I improvised on xylophone.

Banned Telepath 27 150119 Seattle
Banned Telepath 27 150119 Somerville
Banned Rehearsal 877 150119 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer (in Seattle); Aaron Keyt (in Somerville)

Aaron sent us his wash cycle.

Playlist

Live

 

May 31, 2014

Ian Grunfeld

back steps up which roadies haul drums and gear

Your Mother Should Know

On The Ground

Tom Price Desert Classic

Ancient Warlocks

High Dive, Seattle

 

A decade and more ago Ian Grunfeld sang in the Humidiflyers, the first local band Karen and I followed at Neal's instigation, and the first going concern in that arena whose members we got to know a little. Even then we were among the older folks in the room, but being related to Neal, who knew them from his work at EMP, we were greeted with friendly respect. They produced several fine recordings, but young people often find themselves with other things they need to do so they eventually broke up. With a guitar on a strap and joined by a mandolin player Ian sang labor songs to kick off the evening, which was a benefit for the Seattle Wobblies. It was great to hear that voice again.

 

Your Mother Should Know

YMSK (Karen Eisenbrey and Neal Kosály-Meyer), having been hard at work recording an album, haven't played out much recently. But after all that practice working up songs, actually performing some of them comes as a relief. I remember the first time they played the High Dive I was still in the proud daddy mode of constantly worrying they'd fall apart. But they never have so I've gotten over it.

 

On The Ground was the only band of the evening I hadn't heard before. They play fast and loud, all the instrumentals tightly bound rhythmically. The vocals, a drill sergeant ear shout or an over the emotional edge parental nag, but at a clip, slices into the instrumental rhythm as though dropped from a height.

 

Seattle stalwart Tom Price stakes a claim somewhere between Iggy Pop and Bob Dylan, with a band full of musician's musicians to match. Ancient Warlocks rely on clearly articulated slow changes to allow their huge sound to sink in. The walls begin to glow.

 

Recorded

 

June 3, 2014

Occhi del mia cor vita - Gesualdo - Consort of Musicke, Anthony Rooley

 

Each syllable in each voice is a major event, we focus absolutely on each local event. The outside does not exist.

 

Konzert in F BWV 1046 - Bach - Festival Strings Lucerne, Rudolf Baumgartner

 

How we repeat each other. How we fit. How we glorify each other. How grace flows from above.

 

Sonata in F Wq. 48 - C.P.E. Bach - Bob van Asperen

 

Evening games. A dinner party. So nice to see you all.

 

Grande Jeu with Thunder - Michel Corrette - David Di Fiore

 

Here thunder is an effect, bald and blatant. No great attempt is made to integrate it into the fabric of whatever the music was doing on the side, or even to make it strange or other to that music. A ready-made curiosity.

 

Symphony in B flat (#16) - Haydn - The Hanover Band, Roy Goodman

 

There was a time when symphonies did not need to be grand. This one concerns itself with the sizes of things as lensed by how they fit in the meter that they are creating.

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary

 

June 2, 2014

Banned Rehearsal 860 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

 

June 5, 2014

Hey Hey Hey - Keith Eisenbrey

 

First go at a new project, by revisiting an old one.

 

Upcoming

 

June 27, 2014 - 8 PM

Banned Rehearsal Celebrates 30 Years of Noise

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle